sleepyhead

ichimaru @ 2007-07-19T02:29:00

2007-07-19T06:31:43Z

This week, the world lost two great writers: my grandfather, Irving (my Poppy), and one of my professors, Sekou Sundiata, with whom I spent two semesters in an awesome and enriching course called The America Project. I'm very heartbroken. It's been a difficult month.

Sekou's The Sound of Memory:
The Sound of Memory

or watch him on Def Poetry:
Bring on the reparations

They were both truly inspirational people.

ichimaru @ 2005-08-11T16:55:00

2005-08-11T21:02:33Z

"They're actually a documented phenomenon in Haiti. In the 1980s, Harvard ethnobiologist Wade Davis studied Haitian secret societies and got to know several shamans, who showed him how they made zombies. First, a shaman slipped the victims a powder that made them appear dead. Once buried, the victims were dug up and fed a psychotropic paste made from datura, a hallucinogenic plant. The datura kept them in a haze, unable to remember where they were or how to escape, but capable of doing menial physical tasks as the shamans' slaves.

Though some scientists question whether Davis's samples were contaminated, his research indicated that the key ingredient in the death powder was tetrodotoxin, a poison contained in puffer fish skin. Tetrodotoxin cuts off the flow of sodium to cells and breaks the electrical connections between nerves and muscles. Thus, the victims become paralyzed, and breathing becomes almost imperceptible, but appearing dead becomes pretty darn easy."

planning a move is weird. there are so many things i need to buy, people i want to see, places i want to go...i want to talk about serial killers with luiza some more. but i'm so excited...so excited, that my reading material for the rest of the month is simply a heavy studying of a subway map.

the korean movie, a tale of two sisters, is frightening, by the way. lots of movies to watch, too. lots...beat street, the corporation, assorted fellini, godard, truffaut, bergman films, asian horror flicks and samurai westerns...i can't keep up with my own expanding interests so shortly before the move.

a portable record player will soon be mine. thus i can bring the vinyl with me to new york and eliminate the feeling that i am abandoning children.

ichimaru @ 2005-07-15T15:08:00

2005-07-15T19:09:36Z

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - In a scenario out of "Star Wars," astronomers have detected a planet outside our solar system with not one, but three suns, a finding that challenges astronomers' theories of planetary formation.

The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus ("The Swan").

The stellar trio and its planet are about 149 light-years from Earth and about as close to each other as our sun is to Saturn, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday in the current edition of the journal Nature.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

If you stood on the planet's surface, you would see three suns in sky, although its orbit centers around the main yellow star among the trio. The larger of the other two suns would be orange and the smaller would be red, astronomers at California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

An artists' rendering of the planet and three stars, as seen from a hypothetical moon, is available at http:/pr.caltech.edu/media/trinary-sunset-small-1.jpg.

The new finding could upset existing theories that planets usually form out of gas and dust circling a single star, and could lead scientists to look in new places for planets.

"The implication is that there are more planets out there than we thought," the commentary said.

Caltech astronomer Maciej Konacki, who wrote the research article, refers to the new type of planets as "Tatooine planets," because of the similarity to Luke Skywalker's view of his home planet by the same name, with its multiple suns, in the original "Star Wars" film.

The fact that a planet can even exist in a multiple-star system is amazing in itself, according to Konacki. Binary and multiple stars are quite common in the solar neighborhood, and in fact outnumber single stars by some 20 percent.

But so far, most extrasolar planets -- those discovered outside our planetary system -- have been detected by watching for a characteristic wobble in the stars their orbit, reflecting the gravitation pull the planets exert on their suns.

This method is less effective for binary and multiple star systems, and existing theories said planets were unlikely to form in this kind of environment.

Konacki found a new way to identify planets by measuring velocities of all bodies in a binary or multiple star system.